Working Remotely

In today’s world, disaster recovery is a huge topic of discussion for almost all businesses. In case of a flood or fire or any type of natural disaster, companies should want to have a backup plan in place to spend ideally no more than 24 hours down. This is big picture stuff. But what about the day to day? Employees should always be in a position where their productivity and efficiency are not hindered.

At its core, Thrive Networks is a service delivery company.  This means that our people are our product, so as long as they are happy, efficient, and productive at all times, Thrive can be confident in its ability to deliver the best customer service possible.  One approach to making sure that each and every day we don’t miss a beat, Thrive employees are given the technological ability to work remotely whenever necessary.   VPN access, terminal servers, and soft phones are available at Thrive to all employees.  These remote technologies are put into place not only for some catastrophic moment, but also for more common events such as the electricity going out in your office building or a snow storm hitting and the plows falling behind schedule.  Obviously there are industries that will remain exceptions, such as manufacturing or education, but for those businesses that can give their employees the ability to work remotely, I would certainly encourage it.

The reason I mentioned the previous snow storm example is because that is what is going on right now as I compose this blog.  This morning my supervisor sent an email stating that I should work from home today as opposed to braving what are still mostly unplowed roads.  My wife, however, made her way to her office, as her company has a less lenient policy on working remotely.  What this boils down to is that I’ve been working productively for the past 2 hours, while she is still  on the highway trying to get to her office located a mere 10 miles away.  So my point is simply, instead of having your employees arrive 2 hours late, worry about their commute home during the day, and likely have some people leave early to deal with snow removal, you could actually get more than a full day’s work from someone who can just pull up at their kitchen table and not have to worry about any of those things.  This is something I’m quite passionate about, but from a business perspective, as long as your employees are safe and happy on a day like this one, then you are bound to get more production from them.  I would strongly urge any business that hasn’t thought through their policy on working remotely in these terms recently to take these ideas into consideration.